LOUDONVILLE – Loudonville Police Department has identified the body of a woman found deceased on railroad tracks in the village of Loudonville Sunday morning.
Loudonville Chief of Police Kevin Taylor declined to release the woman’s name as of Monday but said next of kin has been notified.
The police department is in the process of pulling and reviewing the video from the train company to help determine cause of death, which at this time is unknown.
Autopsies are not performed in Ashland County. Bodies being autopsied are sent to the Cuyahoga County Medical Examiner’s Office, which is where the deceased is now located, Ashland County Coroner’s office investigator Jenny Taylor said.
The deceased is a woman suspected to be in her 30s, both the coroner’s office investigator and chief of police said.
Jenny Taylor expects the body to be released late in the day Monday, but the full autopsy report is likely to take longer.
“However, because toxicology takes up to 12 weeks to run, it can take eight to 12 weeks to get toxicology back, depending upon if they have to send it out for further testing,” Taylor said. “So it can take quite a while to get the actual report back.”
Ohio law requires the coroner investigate deaths from criminal violence, by accident, by suicide, suddenly when unattended by a physician for a reasonable period of time, in detention, or in any suspicious or unusual manner.
“(Police) are required to call us because it was an unusual, suspicious, unnatural death, which is why we get a call,” Taylor said Monday. “There’s still a lot of unanswered questions surrounding it, so I can’t give you a lot of details.”
Train-related deaths are not something Loudonville police see often, Taylor said.
“I can only think of maybe one other time where we’ve had somebody get injured from a train,” Taylor said. “We do have quite a few suicides every year — not saying that this is a suicide, it could very well be an accidental situation. That’s why we’re waiting on the video.”
The incident occurred west of the North Market street crossing, and police were notified of the death via a phone call around 8 a.m. Sunday, Taylor said.
“Hopefully here in the next couple of days, when we get the video from the train (company), that’s going tell us a lot of, you know, whether this is accidental or on purpose, just what’s going on with this,” Taylor said.
